Inspirational Quotes

I find inspirational quotes to be one of best sources of spiritual food, which for me is an essential component of a holistic life style. I've been collecting them for years. On this page I share with you some of my favorites.

"A quotation at the right moment is like bread in a famine."
Talmud

"When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic."
Dresden James

"One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar."
Helen Keller

"Sometimes you just have to take the leap and build your wings on the way down."
Kobi Yamada

"Always be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else."
Judy Garland

"Courage is not defined as the lack of fear. Courage is doing it anyway, even though you are afraid. It's the ability to take action in spite of fear, challenge, pain and uncertainty."
Cynthia Perkins

"Some minds remain open long enough for the truth not only to enter but to pass on through by way of a ready exit without pausing anywhere along the route."
Elizabeth Kenny

"Defeat only happens when you make the decision to stop trying. Because determination works. Steady forward motion, even if it's just a step per week, gets you there. So keep moving, even if it's only a little some weeks."
Ken Evoy- Sitesell.com

"Nothing happens until something moves."
Albert Einstein

"Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
Calvin Coolidge

"How to succeed? Try hard enough."
Malcolm Forbes

"The important thing is that when you come to understand something you act on it, no matter how small that act is. Eventually it will take you where you need to go."
Helen Prejean

"Truth is more of a stranger than fiction."
Mark Twain

"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them."
Galileo

"Be who you are and say what you feel because people who mind don't matter and people who matter don't mind."
Dr Seuss

"Life is not measured by the breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath."
Unknown

"Those who touch our lives live forever in our hearts."
Unknown

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
Mahatma Gandhi

"I go into the wilderness and rediscover the world within."
China Galland

"It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society."
J. Krishnamurti

"If you always do what you've always done, you'll never get more than what you've already got."
Unknown

"Love is staying up all night with a sick child -- or a healthy adult."
David Frost

"Take care of your body. It's the only place you have to live."
Jim Rohn

"There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth."
Agnes Repplier

"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand."
Josh Billings

"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."
Anais Nin

"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"
George Carlin

"When you throw your bread out on the waters of life, it frequently comes back buttered."
Mershon Niesner

"It takes courage to follow your fascinations, wherever they may lead. Yet, creativity demands that you trust and stay on the path despite obstacles. The good news is that it's possible."
Gail McMeekin

"I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to be art."
Carrie Fisher

"All things being relative, one searches for what they cannot find."
D. Bartosik

"It's not only what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable."
Unknown

"It does not matter how slowly you go, so long as you do not stop."
Confucius

"Don't fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have."
Louis E. Boone

"All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer

"From error to error one discovers the entire truth."
Sigmund Freud

"A new broom sweeps clean, but the old brush knows the corners."
Unknown

"The miracle isn't that I finished. The miracle is that I had the courage to start."
Unknown

"Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift, that's why we call it the "present".

Enjoy your "present" of life to the fullest."
Unknown

"Whatever the struggle, continue the climb, it may be only one more step to the summit."
Diane Westlake

"Say not, 'I have found the truth,' but rather, 'I have found a truth.'
Kahlil Gibran

"Truth is the only safe ground to stand on."
Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"First get the facts, then you can distort them at your leisure."
Mark Twain

"Let us be grateful to people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."
Marcel Proust

"Let food be thy medicine, and medicine be thy food."
Hippocrates

"If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves."
Thomas A.Edison

"The Truth is heavy, therefore few care to carry it."
Talmud

"Truth stood on one side and Ease on the other; it has often been so."
Theodore Parker

"Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done and why. Then do it."
Robert Heinlein

"If suffering brings wisdom, I would wish to be less wise"
W.B. Yeats

"Only that which is deeply felt can change us. Because it is only in the heart that anything really happens."
Ladyfire.com

"I wanted to be the first woman to burn her bra, but it would have taken the fire department four days to put it out."
Dolly Parton

"Don't just slow down and smell the flowers, look up and see the birds, too!"
Deborah Burns, Simple Living Winter 2000

"The person who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore."
Dale Carnegie

"The elevator to success is out of order. You'll have to use the stairs... one step at a time."
Joe Girard

"The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy."
Jim Rohn

"In everyone's life, at some time, our inner fire goes out. It is then burst into flame by an encounter with another human being. We should all be thankful for those people who rekindle the spirit."
Albert Schweister

"In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two."
Eric Fromm

"Three things cannot long be hidden the sun, the moon, and the truth."
Conucious

"Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."
Confucius

"Try to be the sort of person your dog thinks you are."
Jerry Parkins

"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

"The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself."
Ben Franklin

"Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they find laughable."
Anon.

"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad."
Aldous Huxley

"The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple."
Oscar Wilde

"Sometimes the insane and the contrarians and the ones who are closest to suicide are the most valuable people society has. They may be precursors of social change. They've taken the burdens of the culture onto themselves, and in their struggle to solve their own problems they're solving problems for the culture as well."
Robert M. Pirsig, Lila

"Man prefers to believe what he prefers to be true."
Francis Bacon

"Truth is the cry of all, but the game of the few."
George Berkeley

"The truth knocks on the door and you say, 'Go away, I'm looking for the truth,' and so it goes away."
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

"Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on."
Samuel Butler

"A man who has nothing can whistle in a robbers face."
Juvenal, Satires

"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."
Sören Kierkegaard, Life

"Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans."
John Lennon

"The important thing is not to stop questioning."
Albert Einstein

"The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease".
Thomas Edison.

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart."
Helen Keller

"Listening only to my instincts, I discovered superb things."
Monet

"It's kind of fun to do the impossible."
Walt Disney

"When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on."
Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."
Confucius

"Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint you can on it."
Danny Kaye

"Formal education will make you a living, self education will make you a fortune."
Jim Rohn

"You will never do anything in this world without courage. It is the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.
James Allen

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.
Winston Churchill

"The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain."
Dolly Parton

"Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive."
Elbert Hubbard

"The man who trims himself to suit everybody will soon whittle himself away."
Charles Schwab

"Use what talent you possess: the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best."
Henry Van Dyke

"My goal is simple. It is complete understanding of the universe, why it as it is and why it exists as all."
Stephen Hawking

~Courage is the mastery of fear, not the absence of fear."
Mark Twain

"Man's mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions. "
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

"Seek out that particular mental attribute which makes you feel most deeply and vitally alive, along with which comes the inner voice which says, "This is the real me," and when you have found that attitude, follow it."
William James

"Even a fool knows you can't touch the stars, but it doesn't stop a wise man from trying.
Harry Anderson, "Night Court"

"[about the past] ...the way I see it, you can either run from it, or learn from it."
Rafikki to Simba in Disney's The Lion King

"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through my experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved."
Helen Keller

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"When in doubt, make a fool of yourself. There is a microscopically thin line between being brilliantly creative and acting like the most gigantic idiot on earth. So, what the hell, leap."
Cynthia Heimel

"What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight-it's the size of the fight in the dog."
Dwight D. Eisenhower

"Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow. It's what sunflowers do."
Helen Keller

"It's not whether you get knocked down; it's whether you get back up."
Vince Lombardi

"The longest journey of any person is the journey inward."
Dag Hammerskjvld

"Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today."
James Dean

"Let your heart guide you. It whispers, so listen closely."
The Land Before Time

"Even from a dark night songs of beauty can be born."
Maryanne Radmacher-Hershey

"If you were going to die soon and had only one phone call you could make, who would you call and what would you say? And why are you waiting?"
Stephen Levine

"The soul has an absolute, unforgiving need for regular excursions into enchantment. It requires them like the body needs food and the mind needs thought."
Thomas Moore's The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life as quoted by Susan Chernak McElroy in Animals as Guides for the Soul

"The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself."
Eleanor Roosevelt

"Work like you don't need the money. Dance like no one is watching. And love like you've never been hurt."
Mark Twain

"The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like and do what you'd druther not."
Mark Twain

"When I was fourteen years old, I was amazed at how unintelligent my father was. By the time I turned twenty-one, I was astounded how much he had learned in the last seven years."
Mark Twain

"He is richest who is content with the least."
Socrates

"Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing."
Albert Einstein

"Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly."
Robert F. Kennedy

"To Thine own self be true."
Shakespeark-Hamlet

"Some people come into our lives and quickly go, others stay for awhile, leaving foot-prints on our hearts and we are never quite the same"
Flavia Weedn

"To know someone here or there with whom you can feel there is understanding in spite of distances or thoughts expressed that can make life a garden."
Goethe

"People who drink to drown their sorrow should be told that sorrow knows how to swim."
Ann Landers

"Learning is not whether we lose the game,
But how we lose and how we've changed because of it
And what we take away from it that we never had before,to apply to other games.
Losing in a curious way, is winning."
Richard Bach

"With awareness you give yourself the gift of an opening for growth and change.
Do not criticize yourself because in darkness you could not see.
When you find the light within you, you will know that you have always been in the center of wisdom. As you probe deeper into who you really are, with your lightedness and your confusion, with your angers, longings and distortions, you will find the true living God.
Then you will say: I have known you all of my life and I have called you by many different names. I have called you mother and father and child. I have called you lover. I have called you sun and flowers. I have called you my heart.But I never until this moment, called you myself."
Emmanuels Book

"May the sun bring you new energies by day
May the moon softly restore you by night
May the rain wash away any worries you may have
And the breeze blow new strength into your being.
And then all the days of your life may you walk gently
Through the world and know its beauty"
Author Unknown

"The heart is wiser than the intellect."
J.G. Holland

"It is not length of life, but depth of life."
Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all."
Dale Carnegie

"How a man plays a game shows something of his character, how he loses shows all of it."
Unknown

"Compassion for myself is the most powerful healer of them all."
Theodore Isaac Rubin, M.D.

"You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, and that person is not to be found anywhere. you yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe deserve your love and affection."
Buddha

If you don't go after what you want, you'll never have it.
If you don't ask, the answers always no.
If you don't step forward, you're always in the same place.
Nora Roberts

"Nature has been for me, for as long as I remember, a source of solace, inspiration, adventure, and delight; a home, a teacher, a companion."
Lorraine Anderson

"Live not one's life as though one had a thousand years, but live each day as the last."
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

"When looking back, usually I'm more sorry for the things I didn't do than for the things I shouldn't have done."
Malcolm Forbes

"One of the secrets of life is to make stepping stones out of stumbling blocks."
Jack Penn

"Discoveries are often made by not following instructions; by going off the main road; by trying the untried."
;Frank Tyger

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear."
Mark Twain

"A smooth sea never made a skilled mariner."
English proverb

"Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath."
Michael Caine

"The search for truth implies a duty. One must not conceal any part of what one has recognized to be true.
Albert Einstein

"Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the stars."
Les Brown

"A man is a success if he get up in the morning and does what he wants to do."
Bob Dylan

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read."
Groucho Marx

"Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."
James Baldwin

"Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit."
Edward R. Murrow

"I was drowning my sorrows, but my sorrows, they learned to swim."
U2, Until The End Of The World

"Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you're alive, it isn't."
Richard Bach

"An ugly carpet will last forever."
Erma Bombeck

"The highest truth cannot be put into words."
Lao tzu.

"Dream as if you'll live forever. Live as if you'll die today."
James Dean

"A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come."
Victor Hugo

"You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face."
Eleanor Roosevelt

"Believe nothing just because a so-called wise person said it. Believe nothing just because a belief is generally held. Believe nothing just because it is said in ancient books. Believe nothing just because it is said to be of divine origin. Believe nothing just because someone else believes it. Believe only what you yourself test and judge to be true."
Buddha (paraphrased)

"I do not believe in God because I do not believe in Mother Goose."
Clarence Darrow

"I know a lot of people without brains who do an awful lot of talking."
The Scarecrow, Wizard of Oz

"In youth we learn; in age we understand."
Maria Ebner-Eschenbach

"One of the challenges of our lives is to integrate the pieces of our lives as we live them. It is sometimes tempting to try to deny huge periods of our lives or forget significant events, especially if they have been painful.To try to erase our past is to rob ourselves of our hard-earned wisdom.
Anne Wilson Schaef

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."
Winston Churchill

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it."
John Steinbeck

"Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship."
Benjamin Franklin

"A woman is a creature who has discovered her own nature."
Jean Giraudoux

"The old law of an eye for an eye leaves us all blind."
Ghandi

"Where we stand is not as important as the direction in which we are moving."
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

"When it is time to die, let us not discover that we have never lived."
Henry David Thoreau

"Venture nothing, and life is less than it should be."
Malcolm Forbes

""Speak to the dog in language of the dog about what matters to the heart of the dog."
Bryan & Jeff Eisenberg, Call To Action

"The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question."
Bruce Mau, An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

"As our lives intertwine with the ebb and flow of the tide, we take one step closer to enlightenment."
Richard Alcock

"But such is the irresistable nature of truth, that all it asks, and all it wants is the liberty of appearing."
Thomas Paine

"Religion disapproves of original thought the way Dracula does sunlight."
Pat Condell

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."
Albert Einstein

"We know the truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart."
Blaise Pascal

"A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be."
Albert Einstein

"When you're going through hell...keep going!"
Winston Churchill

"I'd rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not."
Kurt Cobain

"Chase after the truth like all hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coattails."
Clarence Darrow

"Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis."
Sigmund Freud

"Vision is not enough, it must be combined with venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps, we must step up the stairs."
Vaclav Havel

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
Albert Einstein

"There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."
Oscar Levant

"Keeping an open mind is a virtue, but not so open that your brains fall out.
James Oberg

"Do not follow where the path leads, Rather go where there is no path, and leave a trail."
David Perkins

"If we did all of the things that we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves."
Thomas Edison

"Each work has to pass through these stages -- ridicule, opposition, and then acceptance. Those who think ahead of their time are sure to be misunderstood."
Swami Vivekananda

"There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered."
Nelson Mandela

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
George Orwell

"It is one thing to show a man that he is in error, and another to put him in possession of truth."
John Locke

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit."
Aristotle

"The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease."
Thomas Edison

"The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one."
Mark Twain

"The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it."
Chinese Proverb.

"You will only Possess that which you are willing to pursue."
Unknown

"We do not err because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We err because this is more comfortable."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn

"The folks who know the truth aren't talking". The ones who don't have a clue, you can't shut them up!"
Tom Waits

"It is better to be divided by truth than to be united in error."
Adrian Rodgers

"Always tell the truth. That way you don't have to remember what you said."
Mark Twain

"Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man."
Thomas Paine

"A lie told often enough becomes the truth."
Lenin

"New opinions often appear first as jokes and fancies, then as blasphemies and treason, then as questions open to discussion, and finally as established truths."
George Bernard Shaw

"He who wants a rose, must respect the thorn."Persian Proverb

"Memories are perhaps the best gifts of all."Gloria Gaither

"Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.Thomas A. Edison"

"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow."Melody Beattie

"The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before."Albert Einstein.

"We are indeed much more than we eat, but what we eat can nevertheless help us to be much more than what we are."Adelle Davis

"If you don't go after what you want, you'll never have it. If you don't ask, the answer is always no. If you don't step forward, you're always in the same place."Nora Roberts

"I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed." Michael Jordan